The Truth of Yesterday (26 page)

     
“You?
Shouldn't that be up to the-Shit! You're not the cops are you?”

     “Me?” I laughed. It was a little forced, but I didn't think it was noticeable, especially to someone who didn't know me.
“No way.
I'm a private investigator.”

     “Aren't you a little young?”

     “Well, I'm technically still in training, but I've already helped solve three murders.” I saw
Chris
' head snap up at that remark. Her eyes lit up with a new respect for me. “Besides, the cops don't give a damn about Paul. To them, he's just another gay escort and as far as they're concerned, the city's better off without him. If I don't find out who did this, it's possible no one ever will.”

     There was dead silence on the other end of the line and, for a minute, I thought he'd hung up. Then, finally, he spoke. “Ok. If I give you directions can you find me here?”

     “Yes,” I said without hesitation. I signaled to
Chris
to get her attention. “I'm going to repeat the address back to you so I'm sure I have it right, ok?” I spoke for both of their benefits. I wanted
Chris
to pay attention so that she could tell me if she knew where the address was and I wanted Tad to know why I was repeating everything.
Chris
nodded her understanding. I was beginning to think that we might work well together after all.

     “Ok,” Tad agreed and rattled off an address that I repeated right back. “Yeah, that's it,” he agreed.

     
Chris
nodded. She knew where it was.

     “Got it,” I said. “You'll be there for a while?”

     “I'm not going anywhere.”

     “Ok, see you soon then. And thanks.”

     
“Yeah.
You might want to hold your thanks until after you talk to me. I told you, I didn't know him that well.”

     “Every little bit helps.”

     “We'll see.” And he broke the connection.

     I turned to
Chris
as I put the phone away. “And we're off.”

     “We'll take the Metro,” she said, pushing away from the wall of the monument, where she'd been leaning, and stalking off purposefully in the direction I'd come from. I practically had to run to keep up with her. “It's not a great neighborhood,” she said when I caught up to her.

     “Dangerous?” I asked.

     She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Everywhere in the city is dangerous, or it can be. Where we're going is only dangerous in a different way. Keep your eyes open and stay near me.”

     I must have given her a startled look because she smiled the first genuine smile I'd seen. “My dad's a cop. I've had every type of self-defense training you can imagine. I may not look all that dangerous, but trust me, I am.”

     Something in the tone of her voice made me inclined to believe her.

     We got our fare cards figured out and boarded the train. We would have to backtrack to
L'Enfant
Station and switch from the orange line to the green line. The trip wasn't really that far and we didn't talk much. I was preoccupied, thinking about how
Chris
had known I was gay right away. Did I really act so stereotypically gay that people knew just by looking at me? I'd never thought about it before, but for some reason that bothered me. For one thing, it made me less effective as an investigator. It made me more memorable if someone happened to notice me.

     “
Gaydar
,”
Chris
said suddenly. I gave her a blank look.

     “That's how I knew you were gay when I saw you.”

     I eyed her warily. I had the eerie feeling she'd been reading my mind.

     “I've been sitting here thinking about it,” she went on, “and I decided that if we're going to be working together we need to trust each other, right?”

     I nodded.

     “I'm gay too,” she said.

     “Oh,” I said. I wondered if my
gaydar
was malfunctioning.

     “I don't usually tell people, not that I'm in the closet or anything. I just don't advertise it. That's the other reason I think Dad wanted me to work with you on this. He thinks if I see the dark side of the gay culture, as he puts it, then I'll decide to be straight. I've tried to tell him it doesn't work like that, but he's older, you know? Set in his ways. Besides, it's not like I don't know all about this stuff anyway. You can only be sheltered so much when you grow up gay in the city.”      With that she hopped up and started towards the door. “This is our stop,” she called over her shoulder.

     I jumped up and joined her just as the train pulled to a stop. We exited the station and
Chris
took her bearings.

     “Where do we go now?” I asked.

     “I'm not sure,” she said.

     “But I thought…”

     “I know it's this general area,” she said. “Don't worry, I'll find it.” She headed back into the Metro station, leaving me gaping after her. She reappeared a minute later and headed off confidently down the street. I scrambled after her with a feeling I'd be doing a lot of this.

     “I got directions,” she said when I fell into step next to her.

     “Yeah, I figured that,” I said dryly.

     She walked through the unfamiliar streets as if she knew exactly where she was going, her ground-eating stride causing me to trot along. I felt like I had to take two steps for every one of hers. At that rate, it didn't take too long to find the address Tad had given me. Like most of the buildings in this area, it was run-down and a little shabby.
Chris
stopped at the door.

     “He's on the second floor?” she asked.

     
“Yeah.”

     “Ok, so what's the plan now? Do I go in with you or do I stand guard?”

     I shrugged. I hadn't really thought that far ahead.

     “There're advantages to both. If I go in with you, I might pick up on something you would miss, but if I stay outside, then I can get help if something goes wrong.”

     I didn't even want to think about the sort of things that might go wrong, but I'd been in situations without back-up before and I knew how important it could be. “Maybe you should be back-up,” I suggested, a little worried that she wouldn't be happy with that, but she just nodded.

     “I'll follow you up to the second floor and stay out of sight until you're in the room, then I'll stay near the door. If anything goes wrong, you just scream like a banshee and I'll get help.”

     I smiled weakly and hoped like hell that we wouldn't have to put that plan into action. I led the way up the dingy stairwell. According to the plan,
Chris
stopped just out of sight and I approached the door alone. I knocked on the metal door using the door-knocker and waited for an answer.

     “Yeah?”
came
a muffled response from the other side of the door.

     
“Tad?
It's Killian Kendall, we talked on the phone?” There was a pause long enough to allow him to peer through the peephole and then the sounds of locks unlocking. The door opened a few inches, still attached to the frame by a thick chain.

     “Are you alone?” the boy asked. From the two inches of him that were in view, he was bare-chested and tousle-headed.

     “Um, yes,” I fibbed.

     The door shut for a second, followed by the sound of the chain being unhooked, and then reopened just wide enough to allow me to slide in. Tad quickly slid the chain back in place and shot the locks home. I began to feel a little trapped and fought a rising sense of panic. Was he going to do something to me? Would I have time to scream? Would
Chris
be able to get in here before anything happened? He turned to catch my uncomfortable expression.

     “I've lived here less than a month and I've been mugged twice, beat up three times, and almost raped once,” he said in a carefully casual voice. “I'm a little concerned with security. I hope you don't mind.”

     “I, uh, guess I can't blame you,” I said. He was wearing only a pair of denim cut-off shorts and I got the impression that he had only pulled those on to be polite. His body was pale, slender, and taunt with just the slightest hint of definition. His reddish-blonde curls were even springier than the last time I'd seen him and the halo effect was even more striking. Once again, I was struck by his ethereal beauty.

     “You can sit down,” he said, heading towards the couch in the center of the room. He folded himself onto the cushions with a cat-like grace that I envied. I felt like a Neanderthal plodding along after him. I sat self-consciously in an overstuffed leather chair to the right of the couch he had claimed. I tore my attention away from him to look around at the room. It was elegantly sparse with lots of black and chrome. Not much to offer in the knick-knack department. In fact, there was very little real personality to the room. It occurred to me that
Razi
had either rented or bought the apartment already decorated or he'd hired a decorator and given them free reign. I turned my attention back to Tad to find he was studying me with the same care I'd given him and the room.

     “You don't look like a detective,” he said.

     “I'm a private investigator,” I replied, playing the semantics game. “What did you think a detective should look like?”

     He grinned.
“Fatter, older, and uglier.”

     I laughed. “Then I guess I should be flattered that I don't look like what you expected.”

     His eyes sparkled with humor. “Do you go to Michel's very often?”

     “Last week was my first time.”

     “What did you think?”

     “It was fun, but it
kinda
got ruined.”

     The sparkle faded.
“Oh, yeah.
Sorry about that.”

     I shrugged. “Well, that's what I'm here to talk about.”

     “So shoot.”

     “You said you met Paul?”

     
“A couple times.”

     “What was he like?”

     Tad thought a moment before answering. “Quiet. He was friends with
Razi
, but they're really different.
Razi
is loud and likes to be the center of attention. Paul would rather sit in a corner and just watch everything. You'd forget he was there sometimes. But everybody seemed to like him.”

     “Somebody didn't,” I commented before I could stop myself. He frowned. “Sorry,” I apologized. “What did he look like? I never met him.” The question wasn't really relevant to anything, but I was curious. It would also help Tad loosen up if I asked questions that were relatively easy to answer to start with.

     “Cute. He has blonde hair, blue eyes, real small, and...I
dunno
...quiet somehow. He was really cute if you took time to look at him, but most of the time, if there were a lot of people around, you just kind of missed him somehow.”

     I was struck by how much his physical description could have fit me. Apparently, Micah liked a type. “Do you have any pictures of him?” I asked.

     “I don't think so.”

     “Can you tell me anything about him besides that he was quiet? What kind of a person was he?”